{"title":"National cultural history and transnational political concerns in Rasha Fadhil’s Ishtar in Baghdad (2003)","authors":"M. Midhin, David Clare","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.2017138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.2017138","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Rasha Fadhil’s 2003 play Ishtar in Baghdad, she has Ishtar and Tammuz, mythological figures from Iraq’s ancient past, appear in Baghdad during the Iraq War, and has them experience many of the horrors associated with the American occupation, including being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. This article demonstrates that, in writing the play, Fadhil attempted to engage audiences both in Iraq and across the wider world. Fadhil’s attempt to appeal to Iraqi audiences was related to her employment of a common technique in Iraqi drama: discussing the political present by invoking characters from history or Iraqi mythology. But Fadhil broke new ground by ‘mix[ing …] legend and reality,’ rather than keeping the action safely confined to the past or a mythical realm. Her play was also revolutionary in its focus on women within a story that, within Iraqi drama and media, would normally focus primarily or exclusively on men. Ultimately, the risks that Fadhil took have limited the play’s appeal to Iraqi theatremakers and readers. Fadhil’s play also aspired to touch and influence people across the wider world. Specifically, she wanted to use the play to expose and condemn the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of American neo-imperialism.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"1 1","pages":"3 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72680054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theatrical performance as a transnational vehicle: David Bergelson’s I Shall Not Die but Live in Mandatory Palestine","authors":"Shelly Zer-Zion","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.2010171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.2010171","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT David Bergelson’s “I Shall Not Die but Live” takes place during the Nazi invasion of the USSR, in a collective settlement adjacent to an agricultural experimentation farm in the Ukraine. The world premiere of the play took place in Habima in May 1944. It was the first theatre production performed in an Eretz-Israeli theatre to deal with the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. This article follows the transnational network facilitated by this play, its production and public discourse, and explores how this play imported into the Yishuv a symbolic conceptualization of the Holocaust and the Jewish struggle against Nazism. The article points to the centrality of the transnational Jewish cultural mechanism in the shaping of a national, Eretz-Israeli Jewish identity.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"94 1","pages":"343 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83570383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In pursuit of a new theatre: the case of the Malvern festival","authors":"Soudabeh Ananisarab","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.2006925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.2006925","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers the impact of the not-for-profit motive promoted by radical campaigners of the New Theatre movement on accounts of British theatre history. Using the Malvern Festival (1929–1949) as a case study of similar ventures associated with the New Theatre movement, this article explores the ways in which influential figures involved with these projects have distorted narratives of theatre through their emphasis on the not-for-profit/commercial binary opposition. The correspondence between key collaborators in the Festival – Bernard Shaw, Sir Barry Jackson and the lessee of the Malvern Theatre, Roy Limbert – discussed in this article reveals the flaws in such narratives, contradicting previous accounts of the Festival. These letters reveal that Shaw and Jackson failed to adhere to their own condemnations of profitmaking as they struggled to reconcile this outlook with the reality of the Malvern Festival and more broadly the material conditions of theatre.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"41 1","pages":"278 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76584984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The felt sense of performance: affective meaning at the edge of words","authors":"Ana Cristina Nunes Pais","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1997441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1997441","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Created by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Thinking at the Edge (TAE) enables the articulation of meaning implicit in embodied experience, which in turn discloses the affective meaning of words (or topics), thus, empowering one to speak and think creatively from one’s felt knowledge. In this article, I present and analyse three TAE processes undertaken by Portuguese native speaker performers – Sónia Baptista, Maria Duarte, and Andrea Maciel – who have chosen to explore and expand the terms ‘performing’, ‘presence’, and ‘play’, respectively. Considering these terms from the felt sense of each performer’s culturally and aesthetically situated experience opens new ground to build a collaborative and affectively embodied vocabulary that can illuminate different approaches or lines of enquiry into some of the core concepts of theatre practice and performance studies. Based on these three cases, I argue that TAE is a stimulating tool to access the felt sense of live performance, thus contributing to the development of research on affect from a meaningful personal standpoint.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"13 1","pages":"261 - 277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77692838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Qibla—a never-ending story of migration, runaway, and pilgrimage","authors":"Tsu-Chung Su","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1989226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1989226","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Qibla, written by the female playwright Wan-Ting Shen, is the title of the Best Play of the 2015 Taiwan Literature Award. This play, directed by Dong-Ning Hsieh, Artistic Director of Voleur du Feu Theatre, had its premiere in 2017. In her play, Shen portrays the interaction between a live-in foreign caregiver called Nadie and a Granny who suffers from Alzheimer and lives in the countryside. The purpose of this paper is to examine the three major motifs ─ migration, runaway, and pilgrimage ─ that are central to the play’s textuality and theatricality. The script and performance analysis of The Qibla are highlighted while a socio-economic and political background regarding the foreign migrant workers is provided so as to give the play a proper context. Since the three main characters, Nadie, Granny, and V-Rod, are all female subalterns who live on the margin of a society called the ‘Ocean State,’ this paper attempts to employ an anti-essentialist viewpoint derived from subaltern studies to investigate the social and biopolitical issues exposed in the play. In conjunction with this viewpoint, this paper intends to adopt the Brechtian reading to interrogate Hsieh’s directing approach and Shen’s dramaturgy.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"73 8","pages":"68 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72451269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Post-anthropocentric Rehearsal Studies. A conceptual framework to account for the social and material mediations in performance-making","authors":"Carmen Pellegrinelli, L. Parolin","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1979337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1979337","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uses the concept of ‘mediation’ to account for the sociomateriality involved in the rehearsal of a new play. Drawing on ideas from the ‘New Sociology of Art’ that has its origins in Science and Technology Studies, we show how the sociomateriality of the rehearsal is an essential part of the process of theatre-making. It means giving to materials, bodies and matters in the rehearsal room a crucial role in the process of developing and refining a scene. Using ethnographic research methods, with particular emphasis on excerpts from video recordings, we analyse specific activities that take place in the rehearsal room to give a less anthropocentric and a more nuanced reading of the processes that contribute to the creation of a scene. Analysing the dynamics of entanglements in work practices of performance-making, we reveal the material base of the easily overlooked professional processes that constitute the craft of theatre.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"52 1","pages":"130 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91325655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theatre practitioners as unionists: art workers in post-independence Zimbabwe’s theatre sector (1980 – 1999)","authors":"Nkululeko Sibanda","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1979338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1979338","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article attempts to frame and examine the structuring of labour struggles from the precarious subject position of theatre workers, without isolating these struggles into the occupational sector of the creative industries in the Zimbabwean context between 1980 and 1999. In this article, I frame theatre practitioners as ‘art – workers’ and collectives such as the NTO and ZACT as mobilising and organising agencies operating within the postcolonial Zimbabwean theatre industry. On the one hand, the NTO controlled and administered purpose-built theatres, provided funding as well as organised affiliates into a unity. On the other hand, ZACT organised multi-racial Zimbabwean theatre groups into a collective, providing and mobilising financial and organisational support towards the creation of a ‘national theatre’ narrative. Deploying resource mobilisation and rational choice theories, this paper submits that NTO and ZACT mobilized and coordinated their stakeholders towards addressing the precarious work conditions in the sector. This paper argues while attempts, through theatre associations, have been undertaken to organise the creative sector, this paper submits that the precarious nature of the work, employer-employee non-distinction, lack of legal rights knowledge and fierce inter-and intra-organisational competition complicates the process of re-mobilising and organising creatives in Zimbabwe","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"48 1","pages":"240 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85120766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Truth’, technology and transmedial theatre in Europe","authors":"A. Scheer, Siobhán O’Gorman","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1964850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1964850","url":null,"abstract":"Recent scholarship has expanded upon the concept of populism as performance to include a focus on how it employs digital technologies (Baldwin-Philippi 2018). However, a relatively unexplored dimension of such discussion is the relationship between political and ‘artistic’ or theatrical performances of populism. If the latter appropriate right-wing populist discourse to potentially parody how it frames its nationalist rhetoric as an ‘appeal to “the people”’ (Canovan 1999, 3), then how do the relationships between performers and spectator-participants differ from those forged through public manifestations of populist politics? How have artists who engage with populism employed technology to increase the reach and interactivity of their performances, and how does this seek to undermine, and/or generate a troubling ‘belief’ in, the supposed ‘reality’ of such projects? This article examines two selected performances, from Austria and Estonia, that sought to engage subversively with the rise of far-right populism through arts practice developed across multiple media: Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria – first European coalition week! (2000) and Theatre NO99’s Unified Estonia (2010). These two events were exemplary in their respective engagements with increasingly technologized media to interrogate right-wing populisms in performances that drew widespread public attention, nationally and internationally. Schlingensief created an international controversy with his performance event Please Love Austria! in which a group of asylum-seekers were transported to a temporary site consisting of shipping containers located in the centre of Vienna where they would reside for 7 days. Via a dedicated website, Austrians were invited to vote out the foreigner they wished to see ‘deported’ the most. This public action, which sought to mirror the anti-immigration policies of Jörg Haider’s populist, far-right Freedom Party Austria (FPÖ), was reported worldwide to the detriment of Austria’s preferred centre-right, bourgeois national image. Ten years later, in Estonia (known for its technological advancement), Tallinn-based theatre company NO99 held a press conference announcing their largest show to date which would culminate in a public convention for an audience of 7200. This 44-day-long project involved NO99","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"28 1","pages":"263 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83442560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performance and the Right","authors":"P. de Senna, James Hudson","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1974674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1974674","url":null,"abstract":"Theatre and performance scholarship has exhaustively theorised the political dimensions of drama: its strategies, capacities, and materiality, with its inherent potential as a site of collision with existing assumptions and values being repeatedly emphasised. Yet, while the recent rise in right-wing nationalisms across the globe has been analysed from a variety of perspectives, and by a number of disciplines – sociology, media studies, international relations, economics, and cultural studies – little substantive attention has heretofore been given to the relationships between theatre and performance and these reactionary forces, which are often themselves presented and packaged as colliding with a liberal, mainstream consensus. And while scholarship on political theatre acknowledges that there are plays and performances that may be reactionary through a combination of form and content, comparatively little recent work has treated this notion to sustained interrogation, examined specific work in the light of it, or analysed the mechanics of its functioning in detail. This special issue stakes a claim for a scholarly appreciation of the operation of right-wing and reactionary ideological forces in relation to theatre and performance, as well as their imbrication with the very notions of ‘mainstream’ and ‘liberal’, articulating a critical appraisal of the performative appeal of the right, its strategies and subterfuges. We had set out, in the remote past that was late 2018, to situate an appreciation of the balance of political forces within an analytical framework broaching new understandings of the modes of expression, performative dimensions and affective capacities of rightwing politics as it is manifested in global theatrical, performance and performative cultures, often subsumed within capitalist value-systems. We sought to reflect on where the left had failed: how socially liberal artists and theatre makers have been incorporated into right-wing, capitalist modes of production, exhibition and consumption, presenting supposedly ‘radical’ work in venues and environments, and making use of forms that are fundamentally exclusionary, therefore mapping a terrain in which the reactionary may be perceived not only in terms of form and content, but also context. And we asked in which ways have theatre and performance ostensibly appropriated right-wing discourse in order to critique it, while at the same time offering a platform for reactionary views, through forms like parody, pastiche and overidentification. Inevitably, the period of time that elapses between proposing a special issue on a particular topic and its final publication results in something of a disparity between the world that the articles discuss and the world in which they appear. In this instance,","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"20 1","pages":"231 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75349477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Right wing and Street-theatre: from censure to co-option","authors":"A. Mahiyaria","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1964851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1964851","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the modes of cultural organisation that facilitate the Right-wing’s appropriation of historically Left-wing theatre practices such as the Street-theatre in New Delhi in the service of percolating Hindu-nationalism. The paper suggests that a thorough understanding of the organisation behind the creative methods for mobilisation employed by the Right-wing is indispensable if strategies of resisting co-option and building an effective opposition have to be conceived.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"4 1","pages":"305 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91023481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}